Case Study

Proteus Client Services is a Lean Consultancy business started by Gareth Anderson in October 2019, providing businesses and people with expert Lean guidance to significantly reduce their costs through improvements to the business, individuals, customer experience, quality and employee engagement. This can be delivered through projects and training both face to face and online. Lean is applicable to all businesses, not just manufacturing and can be applied especially to an office environment.

Gareth had been working in Financial services for 20 years, the last 5 of which were as a Lean Consultant. It became clear to him that many large organisations can afford to have their own in-house Lean teams, enabling them to manage their costs more effectively and continually look for ways to improve. However, smaller businesses may not have the budget to have this vital expertise within their business so he started Proteus Client Services with the main aim of ensuring that any business could avail of Lean in an affordable but beneficial manner.

The biggest challenge, aside from the Covid related restrictions has been the lack of knowledge in businesses of what Lean is and how it can benefit them. A lot of businesses are implementing certain Lean tools and techniques without realising they are, however there could be tools they are not using that could be significantly more beneficial to them. Not only do Gareth aim to support businesses with Lean expertise, but he also provides training and coaching to upskill them in Lean methodologies to help them sustain any changes they make and embed a culture of continuous improvement.

Gareth availed of the Business Start Up Coaching programme and was assigned a coach from Mallusk Enterprise. He explains how it benefited him as he started out: "The coaching programme helped me with a specific area that I needed to develop, which was marketing. I received support and expert advise on how I could improve my approach to this and utilise certain tools in social media to put my business in front of those who could need my services.

My coach was knowledgeable, engaging and supportive towards the needs of my business."

The future is looking bright for Gareth. Based on engagement since the start of the year, he can see his business becoming busier and more established in the market. His hope is that by year end, he will be looking to expand through recruitment to allow the business to support more clients and bigger projects.